The NetBSD Foundation Moves to a Two Clause BSD License

Alistair Crooks <agc <at> netbsd.org>
2008-06-20 16:10:19 GMT

The NetBSD Foundation Moves to a Two Clause BSD License
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Following on from a vote amongst the membership of the NetBSD
Foundation, and in recognition of the changing face of software
licensing, the Foundation has changed its recommended license to be a
2 clause BSD license. A template version of this new license is
included at the bottom of this email. This recommended license is the
one that the Foundation strongly encourages its contributors to use
when assigning copyright to the Foundation.
At the same time, all the code which was contributed to the NetBSD
Foundation has been modified to use the new 2-clause NetBSD license.
The change in license has come about because of a number of factors:
+ we have seen organisations and people concerned about the old clause
3 (the advertising clause) in the license, to the extent where NetBSD
code could not be used in commercial products; the new license means
that these concerns are no longer valid
+ UCB moved some time ago to remove clause 3 from the code
contributed to UCB; this change mirrors that one
+ we have seen some instances where clause 3 was ignored by groups
and organisations
+ the members of the NetBSD Foundation (i.e. its developers) no
longer considered clause 4 (the "endorsement" clause) to be useful